Ron Paul Debate Highlights from New Hampshire [QUOTES]

The New Hampshire primary is two days away, the candidates just finished two debates and Rep. Ron Paul is polling second behind frontrunner Mitt Romney.

Below are highlights of Paul from his New Hampshire debates on Sunday and Saturday.

Foreign Policy

I don't see how we can have anybody really compete with Obama who doesn't challenge this huge empire we have overseas and the overseas spending. I mean this is now nations come down...That's how the Soviets came down.

I think people who don't serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments have no right to send our kids off to war. ... When I was drafted, I was married and had two kids, and I went.

We have hundreds of thousands coming back from these wars that were undeclared, they were unnecessary, they haven't been won, they're unwinnable, and we have hundreds of thousands looking for care. And we have an epidemic of suicide coming back.

The president is the commander-in-chief, but he's not the king. And that's why we fought a revolution, not to have a king and decide when we go to war.

Sanctions themselves always leads up to war. And that's what we're doing. Eastern Europe is going to be destabilized if they don't have this oil. And this just pushes Iran right into the hands of the Chinese.

Economics

People who have gotten special privileges and bailouts from the government, they may get the pain [from my spending cut proposals], but the American people that get their freedom back [wont'].

[We need to change monetary policy]. We've had that for 100 years. And right now we're winning that battle. The American people now agree -- about 75 percent of the American people now say, We ought to audit the Federal Reserve. Find out what they're doing and who are their friends that they're bailing out constantly.

Entitlements are not rights. Rights mean you have a right to your life and you have a right to your liberty and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor.

But guess who gets the entitlements in Washington? The big guys get [it]. They run the entitlement system. The military-industrial complex, the banking system. Those are the entitlements we should be dealing with.

The only way you can get back to growth is you have to liquidate the debt. But instead of liquidating debt, what we've done is the people who built up the debt on Wall Street and the banks, we've had the American taxpayer bail them out. ...The middle class is now shrinking. And we don't have jobs. But if you're an individual or a businessman, if you're consuming everything you're earning just to finance your debt, you can't have growth. ... That's what Japan has done for 20 years. And they're still in their doldrums.

You have to understand economics. You can't solve any of this economic crisis unless you know where the business cycle comes from and why you have bubbles and why they break. You have to understand that we've had a financial bubble that's been going on for 40 years. It's collapsing. Nobody quite recognizes it, but we're in the midst of a real big correction.

Civil Liberties

I, in a way, don't like to use those terms, gay rights, women's rights, minority rights, religious rights. There's only one type of right. It's your right to your liberty. And I think it causes ... divisiveness, when we see people in groups. Because for too long we punished groups.

We ought to be able to keep the fruits of our labor. We ought to understand property rights. We ought to understand contract rights. We ought to understand what sound money is all about. And we ought to understand what national defense means. That means defending this country.

I'm the only one up here [who] understands true racism in this country is in the judicial system. And it has to do with enforcing the drug laws. Look at the percentages. The percentage of people who use drugs are about the same with blacks and whites. And yet the blacks are arrested way disproportionately. They're prosecuted and imprisoned way disproportionately. They get the death penalty way disproportionately. How many times have you seen a white rich person get the electric chair or get, you know, execution?